Simulating Pokemon with SendGrid (and an Audience)

Hi, I’m SendGrid’s newest evangelist, Yamil Asusta. I have fond memories of playing a lot of Pokemon when I was young. Blue, Yellow, Silver and Gold. The good old days. Recently I’ve seen a lot of hype around the new games Pokemon X and Y. It is for this reason that I decided to build my first SendGrid API demo around this game I enjoyed so much.

How do you play Pokemon with email? The dynamic is simple. For every email the audience sends to the application, a little mail will fly towards the Pokemon performing damage to it. At some point, the Pokemon faints and I will award a winner in the audience I’m demo’ing for a special prize. The life points can be easily adjusted depending on the size of the audience.

Also, for every email the application receives, it replies to the sender with the amount of damage they performed–a small message regarding the status of the Pokemon and some instructions on how to get up and running with SendGrid.

With this simple demo I cover both the Inbound Parse Webhook and Outbound Mail API, which are easy to use with all of the client libraries we have.

I won’t go into all the technical details in this post, but I built this using HTML5 canvas which I wanted to try out for the longest time. It runs on top of node.js. Canvas is pretty powerful and simple to get started on. I will write a blog post dedicated to HTML5 canvas once I clean up my demo’s code. So more to come!